


This Boy's Life

by beetle



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first nine of one hundred drabbles and ficlets written for joss100 prompts. 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 400, 300, 200 and 100 words, respectively. And a tenth ficlet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Boy's Life

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Didn't do it.  
> Notes/Spoilers/Warnings: All drabbles/ficlets take place in canon. Spoilers for S3 of Ats, and onward.

**  
****First Love**  
  
Abomination.  
  
Bastard  
  
Monster-child.  
  
I hate you.  
  
Like a swallowed coal, wedged in too deep to be removed, you shine and you burn; like a determined adversary, you thrive and and grow stronger.   
  
You are light in the darkness, meaning from emptiness . . . life in the midst of death and I  _hate_  you.  
  
I hate you.  
  
If I could cut you out of my flesh like the cancer you are--halt the spread of your corruption, of your disease, of your  _soul_ \--I would.  
  
You are unasked for, unwanted and unloved.  
  
An abomination.  
  
A bastard  
  
A monster. . . .  
  
. . . child. . . .  
  
 _I hate you._  
  
  
  
  
 **Music**  
  
“How’s the little nipper, Fredikins?”  
  
Fred dimples. “Some strained carrots, a little applesauce and he’s ready for nappy-bye.”  
  
“Hmm . . . just like his daddy.”  
  
Fred giggles and Lorne leans over the bassinet. Connor smiles and waves his arms like he wants to be picked up.  
  
Without hesitation, Lorne obliges. He’d honestly had no idea that human children were so light and fragile and  _warm_.   
  
“How ya doin’, pumpkin?”  
  
Connor stares up at him, entranced. The vibes coming off the kid, now? Wow--curiosity, sleepiness, happiness . . . no fear.  
  
Good vibes, for a good kid.  
  
 _“. . . Mama may have . . . Papa may have. . . .”_  
  
Lorne’s snapped out of his reverie by Billie Holliday. Fred’s tuned her radio in to some jazz station and Lorne hadn’t even noticed.  
  
“He loves jazz,” she explains, smiling. “Whenever they play Billie, or Ella, he makes these cute little noises--like he’s singing along--”  
  
Before Fred finishes her explanation, Connor’s back in the bassinet and Lorne’s out the door, her concern and Lady Day’s golden voice following him all the way:  
  
 _“. . . and God bless the child that’s got his own . . . that’s got his own. . . .”_  
  
Lorne’s doesn’t know what Connor’s got; he has a strong feeling that he doesn’t want to.  
  
  
  
  
 **Parent**  
  
“It’s tough being a good dad.   
  
“I’m constantly worrying about stuff: am I holding you right? Is the formula I give you the best? Are you warm enough? Are you happy? How the heck am I gonna teach you how to throw a football, or draw a hopscotch grid--or get you Christened--without bursting into flame?”  
  
Angel walks the length of the  _Hyperion_ ’s mostly unused industrial kitchen, rubbing Connor’s warm back slowly, gently.  
  
“Which isn’t to say that babies aren’t worth having, ‘cause they are--you especially, daddy loves ya, little guy, yes he does!--it’s just so tough . . . being a good dad.” Angel digs deep for good memories of his own father and comes up with nothing but the look of terror and disappointment on his face as he died.  
  
“Though some kids are just harder to raise right than others . . . but you--” he holds Connor up in the air; as always, he’s stunned--and a bit dismayed--to realize the boy’ll be the spitting image of his mother, fine-featured and pretty. “You’re a good kid--the  _best_ kid. Better than I deserve, though I guess that’s true of most kids.  
  
“I just hope the innocence that shines out of your eyes never changes,” Angel murmurs.  
  
Connor begins to fuss. Before his little face can screw-up for crying, Angel’s in gameface, growling and mugging.   
  
In seconds, the huge kitchen is filled with happy peals of baby-laughter.  
  
“What do I tell you when you’re old enough to notice that not all daddies can make  _for-real_  monster faces, hunh? What’ll daddy do then?” Angel coos through a mouthful of fangs. Connor just laughs and tries to grab Angel’s nose--but the question’s rhetorical, anyway.   
  
Angel figures they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.  
  
  
  
  
 **Jealousy**  
  
“I was never jealous of her, you know.”  
  
She rocks the bassinet slowly, lovingly. Connor’s waves his hands, trying to touch the mobile dangling just out of reach.  
  
“I was never jealous that she was so pretty--I’ve seen prettier--never jealous of the whole blonde-thing, I mean  _come on_. The day Cordelia Chase is jealous of dishwater blonde hair and some cheap, drugstore highlights, is the day we all sit around and watch monkeys fly out of Angel’s butt, isn’t that right, kiddo?”  
  
Connor makes one of those burbly-happy-baby noises that’s not quite a giggle, not quite an agreement.  
  
“I wasn’t even jealous of the whole eternal youth thing--which surprised me, ’cause hello? I may be all selfless and vision-y, now, but I’m still Cordelia, yes I  _am_!” She leans down and makes a raspberry noise on Connor’s stomach and gets a definite giggle, no ifs, ands or buts about it.  
  
“But when I found out she was carrying  _you_  . . . wow, was I jealous! Of her, of you. ‘Cause I knew that Angel would love you, and make you the center of his world--that he’d always take care of you. I don’t think anyone’s ever loved me that much, not even  _my own_  daddy. . . .” she brushes Connor’s hand with her finger and he grabs it, trying to pull it into his mouth.  
  
“He fought so hard to bring you into this world, to give you a chance. He’d do anything to protect you and make you happy. We  _all_ would.” She stands up, lifting Connor out of his bassinet, and holds him close. He fusses a bit before settling in her arms.  
  
“I’m not jealous anymore,” she whispers, closing her eyes tight for a moment. “Your Aunt Cordy’s gonna love you at least as much as your daddy loves you.”  
  
She paces the dimly lit hotel room from one end, to the other. When Connor stops fidgeting and his breathing evens out, she places him back in the bassinet, tucking his blue blankie around him. For a long time, she simply watches him sleep. His face is so sweet and innocent. He looks like . . . well, not an angel.  
  
A cherub, perhaps.  
  
She grins.  
  
“And . . . maybe I was a  _leeettle_  bit jealous that she got to  _komshok_  your daddy that time,” she admits to her sleeping charge. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”  
  
  
  
  
 **Daydreams**  
  
 _The schoolbell rings; a sea of noisy children spill out the front entrance.  
  
Gunn quickly spots Michael’s fluff of hair bobbing excitedly as he bounces out the door. Next to Michael--holding his hand and making sure he doesn’t slam into other kids--a tall, dark-haired eight year old catches sight of Gunn and waves.   
  
Gunn waves back, till Michael sees him, too.  
  
“Dad!” He breaks Connor’s grip and pelts through the crowd: a big-eyed boy, small for his age and already wearing glasses. But he’s fast, leaping into Gunn's waiting arms for a hug and a kiss.  
  
“How’s my boy?”  
  
“Mrs. Blache gave me this--” Michael points to the gold star half-stuck to his forehead “--‘cause I got all my homework right! And we got a new class pet--it’s another goldfish, like Milton. Joey Steiner said that Milton, Jr.’s gonna die, too, but Joey’s stupid and anyway Mrs. Blache made him stand in the corner ‘cause he was being mean--”  
  
“Whoa, slow down, little man!” Gunn tickles Michael until the boy’s breathless with laughter. Like his mother, he’d talk till he ran out of oxygen . . . or until someone waved a taco under his nose.   
  
“Hi, Uncle Charles.” Connor’s drawn up even with them, smiling a tiny, indulgent smile.   
  
_ Kid’s got an old soul _Gunn thinks, not for the first time, and holds out his hand. Connor slaps him five.  
  
“My man!” They walk to the parking lot, Michael in one arm, the other around Connor’s shoulders. “How’d you do?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Connor’s a chip off the ol’ stoic block. But usually, if you wait for it. . . .  
  
“I got a B+.”   
  
“B+, hunh?” Gunn grins. “I seem to recall your dad saying something about ice cream if you aced a certain spelling test. . . .”  
  
“Ice cream!” Michael bounces, nearly spilling himself right out of Gunn’s grip. “Can we go to _ Serendipity _, Dad? They make the best ice cream in the whole world!”  
  
“They do not. _ Baskin Robbins _is better,” Connor says disdainfully.  
  
“Nuh-uh! How come Aunt Cordy always takes us there, then?”  
  
“She just takes us to _ Serendipity _‘cause you whine when we go anywhere else.”  
  
“I don’t whine!”  
  
“Do, too.”  
  
“Not!”  
  
“Too!”  
  
“_ Notnotnotnotnot! _”  
  
“Yo!” Gunn lets go of Connor and puts Michael down. “It’s Connor’s choice where we go for ice cream today, Mike.”  
  
Michael pouts and Connor looks smug . . . for a moment, then that tiny, too-old smile is back.  
  
“Alright ,” he says, elbowing Michael, whose pout disappears like it never was. “Chocolate ice cream’s chocolate ice cream no matter where I get it. _ Serendipity _.”  
  
Michael whoops and Gunn claps Connor on the back. . . ._    
  
“--not still mad Angel shanghaied you into baby-proofing, are you?”  
  
Snapped out of his daydream, Gunn blinks and looks up into Fred’s worried face--  
  
“It’s cool, I . . . .”  
  
\--then around the  _Hyperion_ ’s lobby.   
  
So many sharp corners--including the weapons rack, and everything in it--so few hands.  
  
“. . . better get to work,” he sighs, grabbing his toolbox.  
  
  
  
  
 **Choices**  
  
“It's a ludicrous plan, not even worth entertaining.”  
  
Connor looks up from chasing  _Cheerios_  around his high-chair table and smiles. Though perhaps it’s just gas.  
  
“I simply refuse to believe everything I read in thousand-year old scrolls--and I certainly refuse to believe everything told to me by a giant, irate hamburger.   
  
"Your father loves you, you know. Quite a great deal, in fact.”  
  
But Connor’s already lost interest and gone back to  _Cheerios_ -chasing.  
  
“I can’t conceive of him trying to harm you--at least not on purpose,” Wesley adds, plucking off several  _Cheerios_  that are stuck to Connor’s cheeks and forehead, and dropping them in the trash.  
  
“No--that’s a lie. I obviously  _can_  conceive of him harming you. Of course I can. I was-- _am_  a Watcher. Trained to see thing things others can’t or won’t see . . . make the choices they won’t make. . . .  
  
“ _Where_  could I possibly take you? What would I do with you? Be your father? I wouldn’t know how.”   
  
Connor’s staring at him again, fingers in his mouth and a rapidly expanding puddle of drool forming on the table under his chin. Sighing, Wesley takes out a plain white handkerchief--he learned his lesson long ago; never bring the monogrammed ones to work--and dabs Connor’s face. It’s putting a finger in the dike, but one must always do what one can.  
  
“Now, you’re a proper young gentleman.” He picks Connor up, settling him in the crook of his arm. Connor gives him a look, as if to say:  _well! Fancy meeting you here!_  
  
Such a loving, beloved child.  
  
“Why is it that a vampire--even one with a soul--is a better father than mine ever was--than I could ever be?”  
  
Connor makes a sound like  _blech!_  and spits out a mostly-dissolved  _Cheerio_  on Wesley’s shirt sleeve.  
  
“Yes, my thoughts exactly.” A burst of futility suddenly weighs him down, bringing with it a certain clarity.  
  
Does he really mean to take Connor?   
  
“Bosh,” Wesley mutters, an unconscious and uncanny imitation of his maternal grandfather. “There must be some other solution--some other choice than committing a felony. Perhaps the prophecies are wrong--or I’ve translated them incorrectly. My command of the ancient languages maybe slipping a bit. . . .  
  
“Not to mention that damned dodgy hamburger--”  
  
Sighing, Wesley places the wriggling baby back in his high-chair and goes back to his re-re-re-retranslation.  
  
  
  
  
 **The End**  
  
“Guess I’ve been startin’ books since I was three years old.   
  
“Books about turtles and puppies and princesses and photo-voltaic technology . . . well, okay, I didn’t start  _that_  particular book till I was eight, but--I just  _love_  books, I always have. Startin’ ‘em, wadin’ through ‘em like you wade into a deep, fast river. Careful to find smooth stones to step on, so you don’t lose your footing and get swept under or away. . . .  
  
“Though getting swept away was half the fun.  
  
“But the best part of books for me’s gotta be the end. Not ‘cause I don’t like the stories they tell, but because endings mean one adventure’s over and a whole new story can begin. . . .   
  
“Your story started out happy enough. But then tragedy comes in at the end--like to blind-side a person! And Lord knows I’m not one of those weepy girls that cries every time a cartoon deer gets shot by a cartoon hunter . . . aw, who’m I kiddin’? I cried when _Charlotte_  died, and I  _hate_  spiders, the nasty ol’ things--!  
  
“Lordy, listen to me, makin’ this all about  _my_  grief! Wesley’s in the hospital with a cut throat. Lorne’s swillin’ Seabreezes like they’re goin’ outta style--Charles won’t stay in the  _Hyperion_  for longer than it takes to grab a shower and clean off his axe. And Cordy and Groo have  _this_  waitin’ for ‘em when they get back.  
  
“Angel won’t talk even about it. About  _you_.”  
  
Fred rests her hand on the top of the bassinet. It looks so empty and pointless. Not quite real. Like the  _Hyperion_  feels.  
  
“Sweet little boy . . . you brightened this place. Made it-- _live_ , for a brief, brief time. Thank you.”  
  
Fred rocks the bassinet once . . . watches it slow to a final stop.  
  
End of story.  
  
  
  
  
 **Child**  
  
Some people look at children and see immortality--not me.   
  
Speaking as a guy with the inside dope? Passing on genetic information does not make you immortal.  _Not dying_  makes you immortal. Children are just the universe’s idea of a consolation prize--better than one of those fruit-and-cheese baskets you give your dentist every Christmas . . . not quite as cool as a George Foreman Grill.   
  
The fat drips right off, is all I’m saying.   
  
Yeah . . . children aren’t your immortality. They aren’t monuments to the past, or ambassadors to the future. What they are is little bundles of potential.   
  
Hitler was somebody’s child. So was Vlad the Impaler, Stalin--that kid in the Dell commercials. They were all children, once, with destinies stretching ahead of them like red velvet carpets, ready to be walked down.   
  
Too bad some time-hopping forward-thinker didn’t cripple ‘em, first. . . .  
  
Ah, who’m I kidding? It’d take a bigger bastard than me to look into his big, blue eyes and not wanna give him the whole wide world on a shiny silver platter.  
  
He’s a cute kid, there’s no denying; and I’m a softy.  
  
Fortunately for me, cute doesn’t last long in the Quor’thoth.  
  
  
  
  
 **Vengeance**  
  
The firmament here is a sulfurous, burning red . . . as if the sky itself is damned.  
  
The air is bitter, caustic; when the wind blows, it abrades the skin and the eyes, scorches the lungs.   
  
Grown thin and strangely silent, the child yet thrives.  
  
The child . . . ceaselessly, I must fend for myself, and for it. I dare not take any real rest, lest I wake in death’s embrace.   
  
Yet were I to spend an eternity trapped in this hell of my own making--if compelled to recant by the Lord, God, Himself, I would  _still_ respond so:  
  
 _My vengeance is sweet._

**Midnight**  
  
 _“Papa. . . ?”_    
  
Holtz doesn’t know what manner of demon it is, only that it’s different from what used to linger outside their cave of a night.  
  
 _“Papa, please?”_  
  
It calls to them--to Holtz--in voices from a past he refuses to think about.  
  
 _“I’m frightened, and I can’t find Momma!”_  
  
Holtz believes that which normally hunts them in the midnight watches fears this thing.  
  
 _“He damned me, Papa!”_  
  
It has beleaguered them for many nights, but like most of the devils in this Hell, cannot enter the refuges of the souled without invitation.   
  
 _“Won’t you see me avenged?”_  
  
Standing guard at the mouth of their cave, Steven does not sleep. He spends most nights thus; awake and ready, their best knives clutched in his tiny, deadly hands.   
  
“Child.”  
  
Steven’s blue eyes do not shift from the thing that calls from the darkness, but he twitches--a sure sign that his attention has split: half on Holtz, half on the creature beyond the cave entrance.  
  
“What do you hear when it calls?” Holtz asks, just to hear the boy’s answer. At last, blue eyes, the innocent color of cornflowers-- _her_  eyes--dart to Holtz.   
  
“It calls me Connor, and wants me to go out to it.”  
  
Question answered, those eyes shift to the darkness again, narrowed in concentration.   
  
 _“Can’t I come inside, Papa?”_  
  
Holtz has never laid eyes on this thing--it always waits well beyond the reach of firelight--and he does not wish to. But Steven has--he watches it, even now, with a fascination born of blood-lust and something else. . . .   
  
“Steven!”  
  
This time, the attentive twitch is more like a start and Steven’s eyes follow it immediately, guiltily. There is no innocence there, only obedience. “Yes, Father?”  
  
The obedience of a blade waiting to be used.  
  
“Kill it, Steven.”  
  
A predatory half-smile and Steven is gone--a small, pale child covered in skins and dirt, slipping into suddenly silent darkness. His knives are spotless and very, very keen.   
  
He is a weapon, disguised as a child . . . waiting to be unleashed. Only four years old, and he has bested everything the Quor’thoth has thrown at him--   
  
 _”Papa? Will you not come out, too?”_  
  
\--yet Holtz thinks the little monster may be about to meet his match.  
  
But then . . . he’s thought that before.  
  
As usual, there’s nothing for it but to wait and see if Steven comes back.


End file.
